Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities

We are grateful to the NBER Africa Group and the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation for partially funding for this work. Some of the data used in this paper comes from the Sierra Leone Institutional Reform and Capacity Building Project (IRCBP) funded by the World Bank. We are grateful to the IRCBP and in particular the evaluation unit for allowing us to use this data. This work would not have been possible without the assistance, collaboration and input of John Bellows, Kate Whiteside Casey, Elizabeth Foster, Emmanuel Gaima, Peter Kainandeh, Philip Kargbo, Gianmarco Leon, Anastasia Marshak, Tristan Reed, Sarath Sanga, Yongmei Zhou and David Zimmer, as well as colleagues in Statistics Sierra Leone. Daron Acemoglu, Erica Field, David Laitin, Helen Milner, Roger Myerson, Gerard Padro-i-Miquel, Dan Posner and David Stasavage, and seminar participants at the NBER Africa Group, the U.C. Working Group in African Political Economy, the Columbia Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Harvard PIEP meeting, the Pacific Development Conference, and Stanford provided useful comments. All errors remain our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.